Now that I come to think about it, I don’t think my head was in quite the right place yesterday afternoon. When my friends and I went to the cinema, I was expecting to watch a film, albeit a lengthy one. That is, I thought we were going to see a fairly standard piece of cinema, more or less conforming to the conventions of post-classical Hollywood entertainment. What we actually watched (although ‘witnessed’ might be a more apt term) was closer to a spectacle. As many others are pointing out, Killers Of The Flower Moon is not a film or movie in the conventional sense, but ought better to be seen as a work of art: It is a long, reflexive treatise on a horrific episode of American history – one which most people probably know very little about, but which it was essential to bring to light.

Thinking about it out on my trundle just now, to try to tell such a story in a standard two hour Hollywood text would not have done it justice. Martin Scorsese clearly wanted to create something more, something substantial, because that is what the subject deserved. After all, Killers Of The Flower Moon tells of the systematic murder of an entire group of indigenous American people: to try to confine such genocides to mere pieces of entertainment, at the end of which viewers can go home and forget about it as they would any other piece of mainstream franchise drivel, would have been utterly disrespectful. This needed to be something more than a film, and I think that is what we got.

To be honest, when I wrote my short, sketchy review yesterday, we had just got back to my flat and I was eager to get something online. Chicken was frying and beers were being opened. Yet, thinking about it, writing that review missed the point. Scorsese did not film Killers Of The Flower Moon so it could be reacted to or even dismissed in the usual sense; he wants us to think about what he showed us, and look deeper into the history. The film is a shocking revelation of the inhumanities of American capitalism – one which must not be forgotten about like we often forget other films. The director obviously wants us to become involved in what we are being shown; he wants us to go on and do our own research, to look more deeply into the episode. Scorsese could have shown such discrimination to us in much simpler, conventional ways; yet he illustrates the murders of the Osage People slowly and methodically in order to emphasise the inhumanity and horror of what happened.

Killers Of The Flower Moon is a clear departure from standard hollywood fare. It requires a substantial effort to watch, not simply because of it’s length but because it is a sprawling account of the oppression of the Osage Nation over many, many years. I must admit that this break away from conventional storytelling made the plot rather difficult for me to follow, which probably gave rise to my negativity yesterday. Nonetheless, we as viewers cannot allow ourselves to dismiss this text because we cannot dismiss the history it informs us of.

To a certain extent, it reminds me of Peter Jackson’s three volume adaptation of Lord Of The Rings: that too was a lengthy story which you might argue could have been cut down into one standard two hour film. Yet to do so would have missed the point because the books the film was based on demanded too much respect. The result is a ten hour epic which stands very much apart from other mainstream films. In the case of Killers Of The Flower Moon too we see a story far too weighty to be adapted as we would any other, the difference being the events it tells us of are very, very real. I now realise I was far too dismissive yesterday. I expected to be entertained, but instead was informed. I think a second viewing is certainly in order, as well as a bit more research. After all, the attempted annihilation of an entire community for the sake of the oil on their land is nothing to take lightly.